Poor Arlen!

I know that it will sadden the readers of this blog that “Snarlin’ Arlen” Specter, former pro-abort Senator from Pennsylvania, who became a Democrat in 2009, in an unsuccessful attempt to win re-election in the Senate, complains in his memoir, according to an article in The Hill, that he didn’t get his 30 pieces of silver:

Specter laments that Obama and Vice President Biden did not do more to help him in the final days of his primary race against former Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.), who beat him 54 percent to 46 percent in the 2010 Pennsylvania Senate Democratic primary.

Specter writes that Obama turned down a request to campaign with him in the final days of the primary, because the president’s advisers feared he would look weak if he intervened and Specter lost.

“I realized that the president and his advisers were un-shy about supporting my candidacy after being stung by Obama’s failed rescue attempts for New Jersey governor Jon Corzine and Massachusetts attorney general Martha Coakley. They were reluctant to become victims of a trifecta,” he writes.

The snub was made all the more painful by Obama flying over Philadelphia en route to New York City a few days before the election and then on primary day jetting over Pittsburgh to visit a factory in Youngstown, Ohio, 22 miles from the Pennsylvania border, to promote the 2009 economic stimulus law. The painful irony for Specter is that his vote for the stimulus legislation, which was instrumental to its passage, hastened his departure from the Republican Party.

Specter was also disappointed that Biden, who was only a few blocks away at Penn University, did not attend a pre-primary day rally at the Phillies’s Citizens Bank Park — a missed opportunity Specter attributes to a failed staff-to-staff request.

Just over a year before, Obama and Biden welcomed Specter to the Democratic Party with a press conference at the White House and promised him his full support.

Specter believes Reid acted with “duplicity” while managing the party switch. Specter said Reid promised him that he would be recognized on the seniority list as a Democrat elected in 1980, but failed to deliver on it.

Go here to read the rest. My heart bleeds for you Arlen, but it is a sad fact of life that no one respects turncoats. Eventually all turncoats receive the reward that is the turncoat’s lot: universal scorn. Most men fall short, to one extent or another, of living up to the principles they hold dear, but a turncoat stands revealed as a man who has no principles to live up to. Ah well, perhaps you could ask your pro-life successor, Senator Pat Toomey (R.Pa), if you could sniff the air in your office one last time. Enjoy your forever retirement.